Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Date undefined

The comparison between the American and Russian use of forced labor for social control and development in a "backward" economy is obvious, and was so even in the 19th century with the publication of J. C. Powell's "The American Siberia" in 1891, detailing prisoner exploitation in Florida's convict lease system. Author Blackmon has collected and collated such widely-scattered documentation of this era into a comprehensive treatment. In doing so he has not exactly broken new ground, but has opened a half-shut door for a new generation of readers.

Mr. Blackmon focuses on race as the decisive factor in retaining forced labor in America, and so it was in the South. As one reviewer has stated, however, poor Southern whites could be caught up in this system, especially in the border South, and varieties of it were found in some northern and western states whose statutes contained similar, if not so rigorously-enforced statutes. But he has shown that the nexus of forced labor practices - convict labor, sharecropping, peonage - were all attempts to recreate the social and economic subjection of freed blacks without technical violation of the 13th Amendment.

But Russian and Soviet practice demonstrate, however, that racial distinctions are not necessary in creating (or recreating) servitude. Like the American South Russia also had a forced labor system, in which poor "freedmen" were trapped into convict labor through the 19th and early 20th century. Here, class was as great a beating stick as race when it came to applying social control to a "backward" and "lawless" and "ignorant" peasantry. The practice was, of course, continued on an industrial scale in the Soviet era, but here too there is analogy to the use of convict labor by corporate capitalism in mines, construction, and railroads in the postbellum South. It is precisely because of this all-too-apparent analogy that cold war partisans will object to Mr. Blackmon's book. Habits of servitude die hard in a culture once they've taken root.

The Soviet gulag was disbanded in the 1950s largely because it was no longer cost-effective, and this also applies to the use of forced Southern labor. Whether sharecropping, peonage, or penal farming, such human-intensive use of unskilled labor was seen as a drain on development by the mid-century. This was ultimately more important in ending the American "new" slave system than the legislative action of enlightened Rooseveltian law enforcement, as Mr. Blackman maintains in his book's conclusion. As Blackmom himself should know from his study of how this system was fostered and ignored at all levels of government, sentiment played no role in it whatsoever, and that included its abolition as well as its creation.

A timely and worthwhile book, even with my criticisms and reservations. Read it, and learn what you're not supposed to know.

Guest